


Kindling

by Tierfal



Series: The Inside of Emptiness [3]
Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types
Genre: Canon: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, Demisexuality, Hurt/Comfort, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2015-11-03
Packaged: 2018-04-29 16:58:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 17,341
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5135456
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tierfal/pseuds/Tierfal
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The heat's not the only thing getting under Ed's skin and scalding him from the inside out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kindling

**Author's Note:**

> Parts of this I realized too late that I was writing directly to myself; and parts of it I just sort of… wrote. So a lot of it is probably somewhat repetitive and possibly a bit boring, and I'm sorry for that. I hope it's worth the time anyway. ♥
> 
> More to come, theoretically in the foreseeable future. Demi!Ed gets in my head and fucks me up and does not leave.
> 
> Thanks to everybody who's said such nice flippin' things about the previous parts. ♥

_all these couples are kissing_  
_and I can’t stand the heat_  
_I lost my shoes and left the party_  
_I wandered in the street_

 _I put my feet into the fountain_  
_the statues all asleep_  
_no use wishing on the water—_  
_grants you no relief_

 _Mother_  
_make me_  
_make me a bird of prey_  
_so I can rise above this, let it fall away_  
_Mother_  
_make me_  
_make me a song so sweet_  
_heaven trembles, falling at my feet_

— “Mother” — Florence + the Machine —

 

* * *

 

Summer weather in Central is like a shitty-ass tide.  The heat ebbs out, drifts away, _stays_ gone—or at least stays manageable—for two months, then rushes back in like sweating’s gonna go out of style.

Ed’s about to go out of his mind.

The worst thing is when it’s hot one day, and then the next day, and then the next—these interminable stretches where the sizzling dryness of the air collects until it _solidifies_ , a physical weight pressing down hard on face and shoulders and hands and feet, gluing the soles of your shoes to the sticky, steaming asphalt, _adhering_ you to the pavement so you can’t even _move_ —

It’s like a long slog through one of the powerlessness dreams.

Except you can’t wake up.

You can’t do a goddamn thing except sit and sweat and fantasize about the winter.

At five minutes to five on a Friday where everyone’s just person-shaped goo in their fucking office chairs, Havoc—who has been tetchy and twitchy and weird all fucking week—sighs loudly, clears his throat, glances at the door, and says, “Okay, here we go.”

He doesn’t even wait for Fuery to wet his lips enough to humor him and ask _For what?_ ; he just pops his jacket open, reaches into an inner pocket, and thwacks a little black velvet box onto the table, right on top of Ed’s latest lousy piece of paperwork.

After they’ve all blinked once each, Havoc cracks the box open and then drops back into his chair.  “Do you think it’s enough?”

It’s a ring.  With a diamond.  A fucking _huge_ fucking diamond, and if Ed’s hazy memories of Al’s brief fascination-with-gemstones phase are correct, the clarity of the spectrum it’s casting on the tabletop means it’s absolutely genuine.

Silence.

Then footsteps, and then a soft shift of fabric as Roy leans against the doorway to his office and folds his arms.

Falman reaches out first and picks up the whole box carefully.

“This is of an extremely high quality,” he says.

“It’s _huge_ ,” Fuery says, with a great deal more audible awe.

“How the hell did you afford that?” Breda asks, eyeing Havoc sideways.

Havoc’s gaze stays trained on the ring as it gets passed between his three most interested colleagues.

“I sold the Car,” he says.

Everything goes very still—except the creaky-ass fan that they haven’t managed to replace in two full goddamn months, which Ed just hasn’t had the fucking energy to hit with a blast of reparative alchemy so intense the factory would feel it.

“You didn’t have to do that,” Roy says, slowly, in a voice so cautious it’s almost… delicate.  “I don’t believe Lieutenant Catalina is the type to be bothered about the size of an engagement ring.”

“One-point-four carats,” Falman says, helpfully.

“She’s not,” Hawkeye says in a tone with more than a hint of iron.

“I know,” Havoc says.  He’s still watching the progress of the little box; Fuery takes it away from Falman and pushes it back down to its owner—or its purchaser, or whatever the exact relationship is now.  Havoc closes it again and then turns it over in his hands.  “But that’s part of why I did it—because I _didn’t_ feel like I had to.  And I wanted to.”  He runs a fingertip along the tiny hinge at the back.  “I want her to be able to look at it and just—know that I’d do anything for her.  That I’d give anything up.  You know?  ’Cause that’s what it means, and I want her to have the proof right there on her finger, all the time.  Any time she needs it.”

Breda’s eyes track the box as Havoc slips it back into his pocket, although he doesn’t button the uniform over it again—not that Ed can fucking blame him, in this heat.  “You gonna ask her tonight?”

“Yeah,” Havoc says, and his smile is faint and nervous, but there’s a _light_ in it.  “I’d say ‘wish me luck,’ but I don’t want it to be about luck.  I want it to be about whatever’s supposed to happen—or whatever’s not.”

The fan rattles.  Fuery drops a pen.

“Man,” Breda says, “it freaks me the _hell_ out when you talk like that.”

“Like what?” Havoc asks.

“Like you _get_ it,” Breda says.

“Well, that’s the thing,” Havoc says.  “Getting _it_ is real different from getting _some_.”

Ed has completely lost the thread of this conversation.  He doesn’t even know what kind of fabric it’s supposed to be anymore.

“I, for one,” Roy says before the weave can turn into any stranger of an optical illusion, “am going to be getting out of here for the weekend.”

“Are you,” Hawkeye says—so lightly that none of them miss the sliver of danger, and everyone glances towards Roy’s Inbox without any prompting at all.

Maybe it’s partly the heat, but Roy wilts visibly.

“Eventually,” he says.

Hawkeye smiles.

“All right,” Havoc says.  He pushes his chair back, picks up his cane, and mock-salutes with it in hand.  “Don’t wish me luck—wish me destiny.”

“You can’t say that,” Breda says.  “That’s not an idiom.  You can’t—”

“Have a nice weekend!” Havoc says, and in three cane-steps he’s out the door.

“Evidently he _can_ say it,” Falman says, “given that he just did.”

“I think it’s romantic,” Fuery says, pushing his glasses up his nose.  They slip a lot more often when the weather’s like this, and all of them are sweating out their body weight in saline every day.  “I’m happy for him.”

“You would be,” Breda mutters.

The thought darts into Ed’s brain fully-formed and crystalline, unheralded and undeniable, and pings off of the wall of his skull:

Breda gets nasty about this shit and sarcastic about Havoc’s genuine contentment because he’s scared that he’s losing his best friend.

Maybe he is.

But isn’t that the point?  Sometimes people you care about outgrow you, or outpace you, or just don’t _need_ you anymore, and—you’re supposed to find it in yourself to be happy for them.  Aren’t you?

“Whatever,” Breda says, standing.  “I’m gonna go get the coldest damn beer this city’s got on tap.  Who’s with me?”

“Cold _anything_ sounds good,” Fuery says, and Falman nods, and there’s a tacit permission on Hawkeye’s face, and—

“You coming, Ed?” Breda asks.

“Nah,” he says.  “These requisition forms aren’t gonna fill themselves out.”

“It’s _Friday_ ,” Breda says.

Ed blinks at him.

Breda holds his hands up, shaking his head.  “All right, all right—squander your youth if that’s what you want.  It’s your prerogative, I guess.”

“Thanks,” Ed says.

“Have a good weekend!” Fuery says.

“You, too,” Ed says, and the heat makes his hand too heavy to raise for waving, but they flit out in the next instant anyway.

Roy drops into the chair at the head of the table with a deep, melodramatic sigh.

“He’s right, you know,” he says.  “You should go—out, or home, or somewhere.  Breathe the world in.”

“There’s a world in here, too,” Ed says.  “One where you’re slacking.”

Roy groans and pantomimes a bullet through the heart.

Ed has to bite the inside of his lip hard to stop himself from snickering.

“Besides,” he says.  Bastard makes it damned hard not to take mercy on him after a while.  “It’d be just as fucking hot at home.”  He takes a breath and lets it out slow, trying to keep his voice as casual as he can.  “And Winry’s visiting, so…”

Roy winces.  Hawkeye sits down.

“If General Mustang ever gets through today’s reports,” she says, and Roy makes a strangled noise; “you could come out to dinner with us.”  Delicately, she selects one of Breda’s abandoned papers and fans herself with it.  “Someplace air-conditioned, perhaps.”

“We need a swimming pool,” Roy says.  “Or a lake.  Or a dump-truck full of ice cubes.”  He looks down at his hands, turning them over.  “I wonder if I could make us a pool.  My yard would fit one.”

“There are building codes,” Hawkeye says.

“I’d put it _back_ ,” Roy says.

“If this heat doesn’t break,” Hawkeye says, “I wouldn’t let you.”

“My ’n Al’s complex has a pool,” Ed says.  Fittingly enough, the words on this form are swimming in front of his eyes.  “I mean, there’s probably a bunch of grimy-ass kids in it, but you guys could come if you want.”

Roy leans forward, and there’s a glimmer in his eye as he grins.  “Do you ever do backflips off the diving board?”

“Only when I’m drunk,” Ed says.  Which is, for the record, not _completely_ true.

“I’ve got three bottles of chardonnay at home,” Roy says.  “We could pick them up on the way.”

“Good chardonnay?” Hawkeye asks.

“No,” Roy says.  “But it’s been on ice since this morning.”  He gestures towards Ed.  “And— _backflips_.”

“Sold,” Hawkeye says.

Ed wants to say something about how they’re secretly a pair of fucking _dorks_ , but he can’t get it out because he’s—

—laughing.

  


* * *

  


The good news is, it was too hot for Al and Winry to do much more than pass out on top of Al’s sheets in a semi-cuddled position with minimal skin-to-skin contact, so there wasn’t any half-stifled assortment of the _worst noises in the entire conceivable universe_ conspiring with the ungodly fucking weather to keep Ed up last night.

The other good news is that nobody actually got especially drunk, and he personally only had about three sips of the wine before the tingle in his head started to feel ominous instead of liberating, so he doesn’t feel hungover at all when he wakes up.  And there aren’t any cracks in his skull from trying to do drunk backflips off of _any_ surface, which really never ends well.

The other-other good news is that it was just—

Nice.

It was nice.

He had fun.

He shot the shit and hung around the stupid germ-cesspit pool with people who _know_ but don’t seem to care much either way.  And he splashed Roy in the face a couple times.  Which’ll be terrible if the bastard gets, like, a staph infection or something, but was pretty hilarious at the time.

And since Hawkeye was there, she bundled herself and Roy into a cab before it got too late, so even with the heat clawing at the edges of his every dream, and the sweat prickling on his skin to rouse him a couple times, Ed actually got _some_ sleep.  So it’s sort of—pleasant.  This morning.  It’s sort of pleasant, and he feels kind of peaceful with his hands around the too-damn-fucking-warm coffee cup, letting his mind float in a wash of half-formed thoughts.

He’s happy for Al.  He’s happy about the way the delight just radiates on Al’s soft, shifting, perfect damn face when he puts his arm around Winry, and she leans her head on his shoulder.  He’s happy about the disgustingly cute way they always start to laugh at the same time.  He’s happy about how she plays with Al’s hair—especially around his ears or at the nape of his neck—and he blushes a little bit but never tells her to stop.

There was a lot of laughing—more of it as they got through the crappy wine, although all wine tastes more or less crappy to Ed’s palate, so he’s probably not much of a judge.  There was a lot of laughing, and it felt so fucking _good_ seeing Hawkeye’s shoulders loosen up, and Roy’s wet hair draggling in his eyes.  They make him feel safe—at work all the time, and just in a general kind of way, with the knowing and the not-caring and all that shit.  It’s nice to be able, in some way, to return the favor.

And Roy’s got this weird, mischievous little Other Smile for when he’s not playing the part of the king in his castle, and it’s—

Unsettling.  Is what it is.  But in a way that isn’t nauseating; in a way that’s just kind of…

Well.

Whatever.

Thinking about Al and Winry makes him think about Havoc, and it’s just about ten minutes to nine, which is probably an acceptable time to call somebody on a weekend, right?

It kept nagging at the back of his mind yesterday—not that he thought Rebecca was going to say no, exactly; just that… what if she _did_?  Havoc was hanging all his hopes on a single star here, and sure, it was a bright one, but sometimes shit goes sour no matter how much you believe in it and in yourself.

Is it creepy to remember your coworkers’ home phone numbers from a brief, semi-accidental glance at your C.O.’s emergency contact list?  Hawkeye would probably say “Creepy?  Possibly.  Useful, and efficient?  I think you know the answer to that.”

He dials.

The line rings three times before it catches, and Havoc speaks through the middle of a yawn.  “…’lo?”

Shit.  “Hi.  Sorry.  It’s Ed.”

“Heya, Boss,” Havoc says.  His accent comes out _strong_ when he’s sleepy.  “How goes it?”

“Fine,” Ed says.  “Just…”  Now this is awkward as hell.  Why did he think this was a good idea?  He hasn’t had enough fucking coffee yet; he’s such a dumbass.  “…wanted to… see how you were doing.”

There’s a long pause while Havoc presumably acknowledges Ed’s unprecedented and insurmountable dumbassery.

“Anyone ever out and told you that you’re a good kid?” Havoc asks.

Wait a damn second.

“Nah,” Havoc says, which is more like it.  “Scratch that.”  What the actual f— “You haven’t been a kid in a long time.  Anyone ever tell you you’re a good _guy_?  Just—really _decent_ , straight through.  Ain’t so easy to find that these days.”

“No,” Ed says slowly.  “Nobody’s… Well.  I mean.  Anyway—you don’t sound like you got your heart broken and ended up crying all night, so—I guess it went okay?”

“Great,” Havoc says, voice brightening until Ed wants to close his eyes before it streams out of the phone as pure fucking photons.  “Totally amazing.  We were walking through the park after dinner, and I got down on one knee and all of that, and when she saw it she screamed ‘What the _hell_ , Jean?’ so loud I lost my balance and tipped over and dropped it, and it fell out of the box and rolled off the path.  Took us an hour of crawling around in the grass to find it.  So it’s a good thing I got the big one after all, huh?”

Ed’s not exactly about to claim to be an expert in this shit, but— “Did she actually say ‘yes’?” he asks, slightly cautiously.  “Or was it a, like, clearly affirmative ‘What the hell’?”

“Both,” Havoc says, so warm-and-fuzzily that Ed’s chest feels like it’s growing mold in fast-motion.  “After we’d been rummaging around in the dirt for a while, I asked again just to check.”

“That’s really great,” Ed says, and he hopes Havoc can hear that he means it.  “Congratulations.”

There’s a dreamy quality to Havoc’s voice now.  “Thanks.  Man, I’m just so… Hey, I wanna tell you something.”

“Okay,” Ed says slowly.  “Shoot.”

“I know it’s gonna sound stupid,” Havoc says.  “And I gotta be honest, if somebody’d said this to me a while back, I would’ve told ’em where to shove it, ’cause… I mean, anybody can stand there and _say_ anything they want, right?”

Ed isn’t especially optimistic about where this is going.

“But listen,” Havoc says.  “Don’t—change.  Don’t _try_ to change.  Don’t try to be who or what you _think_ somebody wants; don’t try to do shit just because you feel like you’re supposed to, or someone’d like you better if you did.  Just be—you.  And do whatever comes natural; _be_ whatever’s natural.  ’Cause you can’t hold up a fake you forever, and that’s not what it’s about.  The only people worth loving are going to want you the way you are—the real you, as weird or stupid or whatever as you think the real you is.  The stuff you think that you should change is the stuff they’re gonna love you for.  And that’s the point.  If you don’t open yourself up to all the hurt and failure and rejection and Mustang stealing all your chicks and crap—and that’s hard; it is—but if you don’t, the people who are worth it are never going to see the real stuff in _you_.”

Ed stares at the surface of his coffee.  On any day that wasn’t this hellishly hot, he’d worry about it going cold.

Havoc clears his throat.  “Okay,” he says, faintly sheepish this time.  “Sermon over.  Just—I feel like—even in the last couple years, you’ve… faded.  And it’s not ’cause you’re less—you’re more than anyone I’ve ever met; even at half-strength, you’d be worth two ordinary guys, and you’re first pick on my team any day of the week.  But I just get this feeling like you’re… hiding.  Like you’re kind of trying to disappear.  And it—I mean, I gotta be honest, Boss; it scares the _hell_ outta me, ’cause you’re the last person who should think so little of yourself that you’d try to smother some of the stuff that makes you so damn great.”

The thing about long, lavish compliments is—

Ed’s brain just turns them over, shakes them for loose change, and throws them in the trash.

It’s a nice thing to say, sure.  But it’s fundamentally incorrect.  That’s a fact of his being; it’s a law of the universe; it’s…

Just how things are.

His soul’s about as clean as the unseen scars on his alchemy-sutured small intestine from that time with the pole in Baschool.  He’s always been pretty good at convincing people that he’s something that he’s not—whole, or healthy, or fine, or _decent_.  ’Cause who gives a shit about the real story, right?  It’s just a big, dragging net of accumulated bitching and moaning he’s got no right to—manufactured miseries he doesn’t even deserve.

“Relax,” he says, putting a smile on so Havoc will hear it.  “I’m all right.  But—thanks.”

Havoc’s quiet for a second, and Ed wonders how anyone in the world could ever think that this guy’s stupid.

“Sure,” Havoc says.  “Hey, another thing—we called Becky’s parents last night, and they wanna throw a little party for us next weekend.  You should come.  And Al, too.”

There’s some timely mumbling from down the hall, not that he was about to forget anyway.  “Can Winry come?”

“The more the merrier,” Havoc says.  “I’m gonna invite the whole office, but—figured I’d catch you while I had you, when you’re not awake enough to make an excuse.”

“Har, har,” Ed says.

“Hey,” Havoc says.  “I’ve known you a long time now, Boss.”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Sorry about that.”

“Hold up just one damn se—oh, wait, hang on—”

There’s a crackle as he puts his hand over the mouthpiece or something, and a few murmurs of voices filter through.

“Hey,” Havoc says after a second.  “Can I call you back?  I gotta make breakfast for my buttercup.”

“Not a flower,” a distant version of Rebecca’s voice says.

“My cupcake?” Havoc tries.

“Not food either.  And the ‘cup’ thing is pretty telling, bub.”

“’Bye,” Ed says.  “Good luck.”

“Not gonna turn that down this time,” Havoc says, and then he hangs up.

Ed manages not to put the phone _in_ his coffee, which is sort of an accomplishment when he hasn’t had enough of it—enough of the coffee, that is; he’s had more than enough of the fucking phone—and sits back in his chair to scrub at his eyes with the softer hand.  At least if everybody he knows is at this stupid party, he’ll have people to talk to.  And it is sort of a nice thought—that he’d be supporting them by showing up.  Sort of giving the whole thing his stamp of approval, not that they need it.

Winry shuffles into the kitchen covering a yawn with the back of her forearm.  She’s wearing one of Al’s biggest T-shirts and what looks like a pair of his boxers—which is probably why Al’s not here; most likely he died of exposure to the sheer cuteness or whatever.  That or he’s taking a shower.  Either way.

“Hey,” Ed says.

“’Morning,” Winry says.  “How much coffee’d you make?”

“Lots?” Ed hazards.  “Enough?”

“We’ll see,” she says.

He opens his mouth to tell her where the mugs are, but she’s already reaching for the right cabinet.

“You guys keep ’em the same place Granny does,” she says.  “Weird how habits are kind of inheritable, right?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Weird.”

She glances at him over her shoulder as she puts one of the least-cat-related mugs down on the counter.  “Kinda like how you’ve been acting for the last… oh, y’know.  Forever.”

She probably means for it to sound concerned or compassionate or something.  But her intentions don’t change the fact that it feels like a chilled chef’s cleaver getting buried to the hilt in his sternum.

“What the hell’s that supposed to mean?” he asks, but it’s stupid—playing chicken with Winry is stupid, because she’s never been afraid of anything, least of all telling the truth, no matter how brutal it sounds.

She turns towards him and opens her mouth, and then she—

—closes it again.

He’s gripping the handle of his coffee mug a little too tight.

She fills hers and drops down into the chair across from him with a sigh.

“You’ve always been weird,” she says.  “I should just learn to accept it.”

He rolls his eyes and tries to release his grip on the mug.  He’s gonna start breaking their kitchenware at this rate, and every other mug is Al’s favorite.

“Can you explain it to me again?” she asks right as he’s finally having a little luck convincing his fingers to loosen.  “Just—I mean, scientifically.  I’m having trouble understanding.”

And here he’d been hoping to make it to nine-thirty this morning without breaking a sweat.  “Which part?”

“I dunno,” Winry says, getting up to douse her coffee with cream before she plunks down again.  If people don’t find _that_ weird, why…?

He knows why.  It all has to do with demographics and statistics and how hard it is for human beings to get outside their own heads, even just long enough to analyze a concept.

“Do you feel _anything_?” Winry asks.

He feels his heartbeat flickering through every vein in his body, light and fast like a captured bird.  He feels his guts churning, and a grand total of zero brilliant words are emanating from the whirlpool of stomach acid and caffeine.

“Well,” he says, “yeah—all kinds of… things.  Just not—whatever.  Like… as a kid, I always sort of figured that when Al was mooning over people, it was this—purely intellectual thing, or intellectual and aesthetic or something, and… when he kept at it, I assumed he was just—trying to get a handle on staying human, or—something.  And eventually I sort of realized that people weren’t just… faking it.  They really _wanted_ to do all that shit, which was why they were talking about it all the fucking time.  And it wasn’t a passing thing; it was really important to them, and it was driving their psychology in all these ways, and I guess I sort of went—‘Wait a minute, I don’t have that.’  Which—at the time, we were so busy and shit that it didn’t really matter.  Except then when we got Al’s body back, it was like… that part of him came back, too, but with a _vengeance_ , and—I think he knew.  I think he’d known for a really long time; I think he knew I wasn’t just—postponing puberty or some stupid shit because I was so preoccupied with him and the job and whatever.  So he kind of… tiptoed, I guess.  For a while.  And that was never what I wanted, and I could _tell_ he was holding back, and he could tell _I_ was, because I didn’t want to wave some fucking banner about it and sound like some kind of freak, and…”

He turns his coffee mug a full three-hundred and sixty degrees around on the tabletop, watching the meniscus waver as it sloshes just a bit.

“Yeah,” he says.  “I guess it’s hard to explain.”

“I’m not trying to be rude or anything,” Winry says, almost plaintively now.  “Just… I mean, you’ve never even had a crush?  Not _ever_?”

“I dunno,” he says.  “What’s that supposed to feel like?”

“Jeez,” she says.  “Um… warm.  Warm right in the middle of your chest—and sort of spreading out from there.”

“Sounds like a diaphragm problem,” he says.  “You should get that checked out.”

She makes a face at him.  “Smartass.  It’s—you _know_.  You just… have this really strong inclination to be around someone; you wanna spend time with them and get close to them and… I don’t know.  Touch them.  Make out.  There’s a lot of fantasizing about cuddling involved—for me, anyway.  And—y’know.”  She raises her eyebrows, but there’s a tentativeness to her grin.  “More-than-cuddling.”

Cuddling is… fine.  Cuddling sounds—kinda—good, actually.  But that’s just sort of a… warm physical sensation thing.  Gentle nerve lights, like crawling into bed and pulling the covers in on a cold night.  He and Al used to cuddle all the _time_ , right after they restored him and stuff—one time he spent, like, an hour with his fingers tangled up in Ed’s hair, just sort of mesmerized, while Ed was reading.  And that was nice.  But there wasn’t any—intention.  There wasn’t any undertow—any implication of _more_ , like it was a segue to something else, like it wasn’t sufficient on its own.  He’s beaten his forehead on that wall a million times—that’s the thing that’s missing, really.  The _more_.  The desire for it.  If this whole relationship thing was just about finding someone who wanted to play with your hair and go eat food with you, it’d make a _hell_ of a lot more sense.

“I dunno,” he says.  “I get _interested_ in people, sometimes, but, like… brain-interested.”

Winry glances at the refrigerator, then back at him, then purses her lip.  He braces himself.

“Are you sure?” she asks.  “Because you seemed pretty body-interested in General Mustang last night.”

There it is—the dagger-point she was leading up to, and the tendrils of the half-formed thought he was avoiding.

“It’s just fuckin’ weird seeing him out of context,” he says.

“And out of uniform,” Winry says, and this time she gives him a full-on eyebrow-waggle thing.  “You can’t tell me you didn’t _notice_ —”

“That’s the thing, though,” he says.  “I mean, it’s—sure, I can sit there and fucking _observe_ that—I dunno, I guess he’s—attractive or whatever—”

Winry actually slaps her hand over her face.

“‘Attractive or whatever’,” she says, faintly, like she’s in pain.

“—but it doesn’t… matter,” Ed says.  “It doesn’t—do anything.  It doesn’t affect me; I don’t _feel_ … I dunno.  Like I _want_ anything.  I don’t want anything.  It’s just like—‘Huh, he looks better than I expected given all the long stretches of sitting around being a lazy-ass alternating with massive amounts of stress.  Also, I’m kinda hungry.’”

“You were looking,” she says.

And maybe she doesn’t mean it to, but the ring of it in his ears sounds like—

_You were lying all this time._

_You just weren’t trying hard enough._

_You made it up to make yourself sound special, to act like you were better than the rest of us._

_You’re not_ above _evolution._

_You’re not any different._

_You’re just a liar and a fake._

_You objectify people every day, every minute, just like the rest of us; you just self-righteously pretend like it bothers you, and you’ve gotten so good at pretending that you can convince yourself that you really feel sick, that you really even care, that it doesn’t feed some deep-down molten part of you like everybody else._

_You’re just lying, because you’re stubborn, and you’re clinging to the childhood you didn’t really get._

_You’re just lying, because you don’t want to admit you fucked this up a long time ago because you were too scared to try it for real._

_You’re just lying, because it’s easier than admitting that you failed._

“I wasn’t,” he says.  “I didn’t… _look_ -look.”

There isn’t enough coffee in his system for this shit.

There isn’t enough coffee in the _world_ for this shit.

Winry sits back in her chair, smirking like she just whooped his ass at checkers.  “Not with your _eyes_ -eyes?”

He tries to shift the balance of the coffee deficit at least a sip in favor of sanity.

“Okay, listen,” he says, fighting to find words that’ll carry all the weight.  “It’s not—it’s—complicated, okay?  I mean, it’s not actually complicated; it’s really simple, but people _make_ it complicated.  The fact that everybody else is in on a joke I _can’t_ get makes it complicated.  ’Cause even when people aren’t… _telling_ me to laugh at it, or talking about how hilarious it is, or whatever, it’s like—there’s this constant quiet pressure from everywhere to just—figure out what’s so fucking funny about it, because it influences everything that anybody ever _does_.”

Winry opens her mouth, shuts it, and opens it again.

“I—” she says.  She presses her lips together, then scrunches up her whole face.  “I’m not trying to fix you, Ed.  I promise I’m not.  I just—”

She gestures unhelpfully to what seems to be the room at large, slugs down a deep draught of coffee, and then she lets out a deep breath as a sigh.

“I just want you to be happy,” she says.  “And—I guess maybe it’s closed-minded, but—being with Al makes me so happy that I really want you to find something like this.”

That one’s less a knife than a long, long needle, sliding in between his ribs, angled in and down, and it doesn’t stop when it hits the heartbeat; it just keeps pushing right on through.

No one says it—not quite.  But it ripples underneath the silences, dancing just behind the awkward smiles.

People like him end up alone forever.

Don’t they?

“I know,” he says.  “Thanks, Win.”

She tries to bury the relieved expression in the coffee mug before he sees it.  “Yeah, yeah.  Hey.”  This with the first dart of a glare.  “Did you dry your automail off properly after you stuck it in the pool last night?”

“ _Yes_ ,” he says.  “I was really careful, and I used a nice towel, and I oiled it after, and all that shit.”

She looks skeptical.  The consumption of a hell of a lot more coffee is still absolutely in order, so he gets up and goes to the counter for dose two out of possibly several hundred.

“How’s it been with the conductivity?” Winry asks.

Which is the nice way of saying _Is the thing I built still burning you?_

“It’s okay,” he says—which is almost not a lie; experiments with covering every inch of metal to keep it out of the sun have been relatively successful.  He hasn’t blistered since he started to try it, and he’s been more particular about keeping in the shade and stuff.  Mostly it seems like it’s working.

Her eyebrows lower, and then one arches.

“What?” he says.

“You always downplay it,” she says.  “All the pain and side effects and stuff—you always act like it’s less than it is to make me feel better.  And that’s nice, but it’s not _helpful_ , okay?  I need accurate diagnostic data to work on improvements so you—and other people, tons of other people—don’t have to feel like that anymore.”

What a fucking morning for fucking lectures.  If Saturdays are going to keep being like this, he’s going to start working weekends.  At least Roy’s easy to ignore, and he gets all pissy when you do, and it’s really kind of…

Hilarious.  Is what it is.

“It’s fine,” he says, and then instantly regrets using such a loaded fucking word.  Nobody ever says _fine_ and actually means it; it’s pretty much code for _I don’t want to talk to you about why I’m not fine at all_ , which is exactly Winry’s point.  “It’s not as bad; I figured out that if I keep it out of direct sunlight, it’s really okay.”

Winry stands up.  “Let me see.”

He folds his arms over his chest like that’ll stop her.  “What is this, a pop quiz checkup?  It’s okay, I swear; I just—”

Only somebody like Winry could make crossing a few squares of crappy linoleum look like the descent of an avenging angel.  “Let me see, Ed.”

He hunches his shoulders and tightens his arms, but then she’s up in his face and pulling at the collar of his tank top to try to look at the burn scars winding around on top of the _regular_ scars around the bolt through his collarbone, and he can’t bat her hands away, because the automail bruises people when you barely even brush them, and—

“Knock it off,” he says.  “It’s _fine_.”

Her fingertips grazing his skin gives him goosebumps—the same kind of bone-marrow shiver as a razor blade scraping up against a vein, and she’s right; there’s something _wrong_ with him; it’s not supposed to be like this.  Not wanting to fuck anybody’s one thing; feeling like a cornered animal when your best friend barely even touches you is a whole new level of _You’re unhinged, Elric; you’re fundamentally unstable; you’re broken so deep down that nobody could caulk up the cracks if they wanted to.  You should go.  You should go away, too far for these people who keep trying to help you to find out where, so you don’t burden anybody ever again._

Fucking panic flutters in his chest, blindingly bright white and frantic, feathers falling everywhere—he finds himself trying to hike himself up onto the counter just to get some _distance_ from her hands—

The fuck is this, anyway?  He trusts Winry; he knows he does; trusts her with his life, with _Al’s_ life, with all the secrets and the worst of the truth—

“Win,” he says, and he hears his own voice shake, and what the _fuck_ — “Don’t—d-don’t—”

He’s scooting back on the countertop; the toaster clangs as he collides with it and pushes it into the wall; the back of his head bangs on the cabinet door, and—

She—

Stops.

Blinks.

Stares at him like he’s—

Alien.

Feral.

Monstrous.

At which instant Al wanders in, dressed in just his pajama pants, covering a yawn with his forearm with his wet towel draped around his shoulders.

He pauses, arm still half-raised, when he sees Ed sitting on the counter, Winry standing in between his knees with one hand fisted in his shirt.

“Oh,” he says.

Winry scrambles back like she’s the one burnt by the steel; her hands lift and then hesitate, like she’s trying to decide whether wiping them on her shirt—Al’s shirt—would make it better or worse.  “It’s not what it looks li… Ed’s into guys.”

Ed’s heart, which was recently filing for permanent residency in the top of his throat and encroaching on his tongue, plummets to the pit of his stomach so fast it leaves him reeling with the vertigo.  “I’m not into—”

“He’s into General Mustang,” Winry amends.

His guts tighten, but he chokes the words out before it’s too late; he’s learned by now that if you don’t correct people quick enough, they’ll fill the silence in themselves.  “I’m not into _Roy_ either, the fuck—”

“See?” Winry says, stabbing a finger towards him from where she stands in the center of the kitchen, equidistant from them both.  “He even calls him ‘Roy’ now!  Did you notice that?”

“Yes,” Al says, and his voice is so calm that that’s what scares them both.  “Is there any coffee left?”

There is.  Although Ed’s practically sitting on it.

At least his countertop vantage point puts him in a prime position to twist around and fumble through the cupboard for a mug.  The patterns on them seem too bright—jarring, overwhelming.  He grabs one at random and hears the ceramic clink repeatedly against his fingers, and then he reaches for the coffee pot.

“Wait,” Al says, and he doesn’t raise his voice, but there’s an iron note of a _command_ in it.  The real question is—did he learn that from Mom, or from Hawkeye?  “Let me.”

Ed has no fucking idea what Al’s talking about until he realizes that the clinking hasn’t stopped, because his hand is shaking.

He tries to freeze.  Al takes the mug carefully out of his hand and touches his knee.

“It’s okay, Brother,” he says.  He turns to Winry and gestures to the machine.  “Did you get enough, Win?”

“Um,” she says.  “Yeah.  You’re not—?”

“Mad?” Al asks, blinking at her.  “About what, the two of you fighting the same way you have for twenty years now?”  He smiles at her, and the sheer adoration in it— “Of course not.”

The relief suffuses her face like a spreading sunbeam, and she glows as she smiles back.  “Well—okay.  I’m gonna go take a shower.”

“I saved some hot water for you,” Al says cheerfully.

Winry makes a face.  “Gee, thanks.”   Without another glance at Ed, she slips out of the kitchen and pads down the hall.

Al doesn’t make Ed wait while he pours himself coffee or anything—just sets the mug down, then hops up onto the counter on Ed’s other side.

“Brother,” he says.  “I’m not upset.”

Ed eyes him.

Al pauses.  “All right—I’m not upset at _you_.  Or at her.  Just a little bit at myself.”

Ed’s stomach hasn’t stopped roiling.  “You didn’t do anything.”

“Neither did you,” Al says.  “Neither did she.  Nobody _did_ anything at all.”

Ed eyes him a little harder.

Al sighs, lifting a hand to wave it towards the room at large.  “It’s all—in our heads.  It’s all in our individual heads.  I’ve always…” He takes a breath, licks his lips, and twists them into a thin sort of smile.  “I’ve always harbored just a _little_ bit of… fear, or suspicion, or whatever you want to call it—that you were always the one she really wanted, but when she realized you weren’t available, she settled for second-best.”

Ed’s head pirouettes a little bit.  “There are so many things wrong with that fucking sentence th—”

“Hush,” Al says—gently, but he means it, and Ed shuts his mouth.  “If there’s a part of her that’s still holding on to all of the hopes she’d projected on you, that’s her business—and mine, now, I guess, as far as how large that part of her might be, and whether I can be okay with it being there.  But it has nothing to do with you.  And I know you’re going to feel guilty for ‘ruining’ something that makes me happy; and at the same time, even though it’s completely contradictory, you’re going to feel guilty for not being able to give her what she wanted from you all this time.”  He picks up his coffee cup and turns it around until he finds the tiny little cat silhouette along the bottom edge.  “Sometimes I think I should write a book about your feats of cognitive dissonance.”

“Hey,” Ed says.  It sounds dull to his own ears.  It feels like the part of him saying it is calling from another room.

“The point is,” Al says, “this is between me and Winry.  You’re a bystander here, Brother—you’re collateral damage.  This isn’t your problem, and it isn’t your fault.”  He reaches around the coffee machine to free the carafe and fill his mug from it at last.  “And what you do or don’t feel about or for General Mustang is your own business, and nobody should try to make you decide.  Emotions are complicated.  That’s _fine_.  That’s why they’re precious; that’s why human beings are precious.  Nothing you think or want now invalidates anything you’ve done or anyone you’ve been.  Labels and terminologies are useful most of the time for categorizing the big mess of chaos that the world is around us, but they cease to be useful—or important—if they start to confine you.  And that’s _okay_.  You’ve never been just a guy, or just an alchemist, or just an Easterner, or ‘just’ anything.  You’re you.  You can encompass all of those things without being beholden to any of them.  People get scared of things they can’t understand easily—you know that—and then they try to pin words on them to make them stay still in a way they’re already familiar with.  But you get the final say, Ed.  You are the authority, and your only responsibility is to feel right within yourself.  And if other people don’t like the way you go about seeking that, they can go screw themselves.”

Man, when Al gets going, he just… _goes_.

“Okay,” Ed says, since he’s still processing at least twenty percent of that enormous pile of words.  Objectively enormous—not, like, specifically in comparison to him, or something.

Al smiles a little, stirs some sugar into his coffee, and then stretches over to touch his curled fist to the center of Ed’s chest.

“You’ve spent your whole life doing right by other people,” he says.  “Playing other people’s games, trying to prove them wrong—I’m going to give you a challenge, okay?  I want you to make an effort—a real effort, a serious one—to do right by _you_.  To make yourself happy, whatever that means, regardless of anybody else’s feelings at the time.  Just once.  Be as selfish about it as you can.”

Damn Al, being so damn _smart_ —

Ed swallows, folds his hands up and then parts them again when he remembers how that traps more heat, and tries to look his way-too-fucking-brilliant brother in the face.

“Okay,” he says.  “I mean—I’ll try, if you want.”

Al gives him the single most long-suffering look that has ever graced the visage of a human being.

“It’s not about what _I_ want,” Al says.  “But if that’s going to help you get started, then—yes.  All right.  Try it because _I_ want you to be happy.  Maybe the rest will fall into place from there, huh?”

“I don’t know where you get all this faith in the universe and shit,” Ed says, “after what it’s done to us.”

“Good things happen, Brother,” Al says.  He doles some nasty-ass lactose-based shit into his coffee.  “And for all that’s ever gone wrong, we have _always_ had each other, and that’s not about to change.”

Except that someday—

He can’t think about the somedays.  Not right now.  Al’s doing everything he can.

“Yeah,” he says, hopping down from the counter and punching Al’s shoulder really lightly on his way back towards his room.  “Thanks, Al.”

“Sure thing, Brother,” Al says.

But someday—

Shit.

  


* * *

  


The week…

…drags, trundles, crawls, slogs, _staggers_.  The heat is staggering.  It solidifies into a physical object, into a layer—a series of layers, individually invisible, stacked so far it blurs out the distance, and the haze of it dances on the road like a line of shimmering ghosts.

Sweat runs in Ed’s hair, gathers on his forehead, in the bags beneath his eyes—seeps stickily into the shirt clinging to the small of his back beneath the unrelenting weight of the wool.  It’s like possession, he starts to think—enduring the heat is like being possessed.  It expands and expands until it starts to take people over; it’s inside of _all_ of them, boiling their guts, pressing outward until their pores just _bleed_ the saline, and their lungs rattle emptily, and their veins contract and cry out wordlessly for water, but their throats grind dry—

The seconds ball up into minutes, and the minutes roll into hours, and he shoves his shoulder at the edge of the boulder every day until it scrapes aside, and he can dart off to the showers and tear off half the layers and stumble his way home.

Winry’s been avoiding him.

That part doesn’t even sting; what’s shitty is the thought that it must mean Al’s right.  How could she—how could _anyone_ —do that to _Al_?

But he can’t be mad at her, either.  It’s like Al was saying.  People are complicated; feelings are complicated; whatever shit.  She’s still his friend; she’s still important; he still loves her half to death.  She’s not trying to hurt anybody.  He knows better than most how sometimes shit just… goes all wrong.  By itself.  Even when you’re trying so fucking hard to get it right.

Havoc’s over the moon.  Breda looks like a man consigned to the gallows, or maybe something slower.  Fuery and Falman just look seriously overheated.  Hawkeye looks tired.

Roy looks—

—at him, once or twice, and—

His heart leaps up and stops his throat, hanging there and beating fast and _hard_ , and he starts to choke on it and—

—looks away.

He can’t tell anymore.

He can’t tell anymore if it’s panic at the prospect of—the kind of thing he’s ended up thinking about _Roy_ , now, of all fucking people, despite himself; the things his stupid fucking self-destructive brain has dwelled on, here and there, like an insect visiting poisonous fucking flowers most people like to smell.  He knows what Roy’s collarbones look like now.  Isn’t that supposed to be sexy or some shit?  Roy in swimming trunks, soaking wet, arms akimbo, grin too bright, is barely half a step away from Roy completely naked.  His head just keeps _going_ there, shoving it at him, and his instinct is to balk so quick he trips over the unintrusive thoughts he’d been having just before, and he falls on his face and can’t breathe, can’t help it, can’t _stop_ it—

He can’t tell anymore if it’s that, or—

Some other—

Thing.

Or both.

Or if they’re the same thing, really; just two parts most people don’t have to separate.

He can tell that he fucking hates it.

What else is new?

  


* * *

  


“Aren’t we supposed to bring something?” Winry asks the room at large—or at pretty modest-sized, really; real estate in Central is kind of a bitch, after all—on Saturday afternoon, by which point the heat’s sunk in so deeply that she and Al are sprawled out listlessly on the couch, and Ed has migrated from the armchair to the floor.  It’s marginally cooler down here.

“Are our inspirational presences and scintillating wit not going to be enough?” Al asks.

She’s got her head in his lap, so she sort of has to contort her torso upward a little bit to smack his arm.  “ _Food_ , Alphonse Elric.  Aren’t we supposed to bring food?”

“Technically,” Al says, “ _we’re_ edible, although—”

“Eew!”  The intention of a shriek gets undermined by the beginnings of a laugh.  “ _Al_ —”

“Sorry,” he says, beaming at her.  “What were you thinking of, as far as food?”

“I considered pie,” she says, “but I think we’d all die if I tried to bake in here.”

“Mm,” Al says.  “Probably the most delicious death.  Maybe we could get a store-bo…” He sees her face.  “Just—kidding.  I was going to say pie would be great with ice cream right now, wouldn’t it?”

“Forget the pie,” Ed says, dragging the back of his hand across his forehead to try to smear the sweat into a less-hot configuration.  “Let’s just get a shit-ton of ice cream by itself.”

“And have it melt on the way over?” Winry asks. “Or did you want to congratulate them by turning up with a bunch of cartons of ice cream slush?”

“I think that’s much more festive,” Ed says.  Whatever else can be said of Roy Mustang, he’s taught Ed a couple of tricks over the years, one of which is that you frequently have to fight sarcasm with sarcasm.  “Al, don’t we still have that insulated cold-box-thing you bought to go camping with your astronomy class?”

“You mean the ice-chest?” Al asks.

“That’s what I said,” Ed says.

“I think it’s still wandering the closet somewhere,” Al says.  “But it’s not that efficient, so on a day _this_ hot…”

“That’s quitter talk,” Ed says.  “We have the best engineer in the country and two of its most resourceful alchemists sitting in the same room.  You really think we can’t _make_ it efficient?”

He knows Al’s grinning even though he hasn’t looked away from the futile progress of the ceiling fan.

“Jeez, Ed,” Winry says.  “That’s the most like _you_ that you’ve sounded since I got here.”

“I always sound like me,” Ed says, laboriously levering himself upright.  “I don’t have a choice.”

Al is trying to extricate himself from under Winry’s head without disturbing her, which is, of course, physically impossible.  “I think I know where it is.”

Winry’s upright in another second anyway.  “Hey, do you guys think your landlord’ll mind if we borrow some of the coils from your heater?  I mean, I can make it work again afterwards.”  She pauses.  “Probably.”

“I figure our deposit’s probably forfeit anyway,” Ed says, “and I can’t even remember what using the heater’s like, so… fuckin’ go for it.”

He’d forgotten just how terrifying the gleam of inspiration in Winry’s eyes can get.

  


* * *

  


Rebecca Catalina greets them with a “Hi, guys!  So glad you could make it!”, and Havoc greets them with a “What the hell is _that_?”

“It’s an Insulated Cold-Box-Thing,” Al says.  “Patent pending.”

They managed to jack it up on some wheels and add a length of heater-tubing as a handle, which is how Al’s conveyed it through the streets of Central City as they hoofed it all the way the fuck over here.  While Havoc looks on in pronounced mistrust, Al hauls it over to the patio, tilts it until it’s set down stably on the paving stones near the table piled with _ordinary_ potluck fare, and cracks it open.

Chilled air wafts out in soft white billows, and an involuntary, synchronized “ _Ahhh_ ” emerges from the assembled company.

“That’s ingenious,” Fuery says.

“There’s a layer of dry ice around all the sides,” Ed says, “with the regular ice on top, so don’t, like, go digging around in it, or you could hurt yourself.”

“Does it circulate the cold air?” Falman asks, pointing at the tubing along the sides.

“You bet your second law of thermodynamics it does,” Winry says, faintly smugly, and if it wasn’t so fucking hot, Ed would hug the hell out of her right now.

“Trust the three of you to turn up with a fascinating invention the one time I actually bring something,” Roy says.

Al’s eyes light up at the mere prospect of undiscovered food.  “What did you bring, General?”

Roy steps sideways, which brings him fractionally closer to Ed’s shoulder, and gestures to the table behind him.

Which has four familiar-looking bottles on it.

“What is it with you and wine?” Ed asks.

“That’s a loaded question,” Roy says.

“Actually,” Ed says, “it’s a ‘Why are you always _getting_ loaded?’ question.”

A prickle runs along the dip of momentary silence between them—a current through the two scant feet of space that separate their bodies.  What a fucking cliché; Ed has to be imagining it; shit this cheesy and fucked-up and whatnot doesn’t actually _happen_ , does it?  It’s just—the heat.  It’s just the dryness; lightning moves from high to low pressure; there’s electricity in aridity no matter who’s standing around staring at each other for a long couple of seconds.  It’s just sweat cooling on his skin from the air that twirled up out of the Box-Thing.  Totally normal.  Typical physiological reaction; nothing—mystical.  Nothing more.

“I appreciate wine,” Roy says.  “Most people think that’s sophisticated.”

“I appreciate bacon,” Ed says.  “Doesn’t mean I’m eating as much of it as I can stand without poisoning myself the second it gets to be the weekend.”

Roy blinks, looking more than a little bit scandalized, and that’s kind of—thrilling, isn’t it?  Being able to startle his impervious poker face right the fuck off?  “I’m hardly in danger of _poisoning_ mys—”

“Alcohol is poison,” Ed says.  “That’s the whole point.”

“The point is the _effects_ ,” Roy says.  “Which are not nearly as pronounced as you s—”

“Oh, look!” Al says loudly.  “Gracia brought quiche!”

A little hand flies up into the air.  “I helped!”

“You did more than that,” Gracia says, and Elysia shoves her glasses back up the bridge of her nose and beams.  “You just about made it yourself.”

“Uh oh,” Winry says.  “Does that mean you’re changing your mind about being an engineer?”

Elysia winces.  “Uh…”

“I thought you wanted to be a photographer,” Al says.

“Uh,” Elysia says again.

“Not that I’d mind,” Al says.  “If you’re thinking about being a chef full-time, you really ought to come practice at our place.  You know, just to test your stuff out on some different palates.”

“Well,” Elysia says, “I kinda want to be a State Alchemist.”

Everybody just—

—stops.

There’s a thick twist of dust and heat and iron stuck halfway down Ed’s throat, but he knows that if he swallows, it’ll seem deafeningly loud.

There should be a clock ticking.

There should be outright ominousness; a loud countdown—something to mark the passage of the _endless_ quiet as they all just… stare.

“That’s a big decision and a long road, sweetheart,” Roy says—very softly, but Ed could swear everybody fucking jumps.  “You’ve got plenty of time to figure it out.”

Elysia’s cheeks darken at the endearment, but she folds her arms and frowns at him gamely.  Takes guts to stand up to the likes of Roy Mustang when you’re at an age where some kids still can’t tie their shoes.  Ed would know.

“I wanna use alchemy to help people,” Elysia says.  “Photography’s not going to save anybody’s life.”

Roy looks—

Roy _is_ —

—dumbstruck.

Al’s not.

“That’s not necessarily true,” he says, gentle as ever—gentler, really, now that he can pitch his voice exactly how he wants.  “I know a lot of people who would say that a piece of art has saved their life before.  It really isn’t about _what_ you’re doing—it’s about passion, and commitment, and the core beliefs that are motivating you.  If you want to help people, you _will_.  That’s just how it works.  Whatever you enjoy doing, wherever you end up, that’s going to shine out of you, and it’ll happen.”  He smiles, and his eyes do the crinkly thing just like Mom’s used to, and Ed’s heart just about wrings itself to death.  “How does that sound?”

Elysia grins back at him, bright-eyed and wholehearted.  How could anybody not?

“Pretty cool, I guess,” she says.

Everybody keeps their sighs of relief on the inside, but they’re so fucking profound you can almost hear them anyway.

  


* * *

  


By the time Ed and Al and Winry make the circuit of the whole backyard and say hi to everyone, it’s been almost half an hour, and the heat’s making the fucking _air_ tremble.  That, or Ed’s eyes are going.  Maybe it’s equally likely either way.  Point is, he feels fucking drained already just from trying to smile at people with the heat dragging on his face like this; everything seems _heavy_ , and the sweat seeping out of his skin all over the damn place is starting to feel like a coat of liquid chain mail he’s got to carry.

He brushes his elbow against Al’s to signal that he’s moving away from the avid conversation with Fuery and Falman about trends in air-conditioning, coaxes his weary body over to the tables piled with food, and picks out the coldest bottle of soda that he can find.  There’s an empty wooden bench off to the side, with an ambitious—and extremely hearty, since it’s blooming despite the fucking heat—rose plant curling little tendril-vines around the slats of the back.  He drops down onto it—kind of gingerly, since he’s not sure how strong it is; his weight’s distributed so fucking weirdly with the automail that he occasionally breaks shit designed for people who are even.

He puts his drink down and tries to figure out, using the time-tested method of touching the back of each hand to his own forehead, which of his palms is likely to be cooler.  Seems like a toss-up; he wore a long-sleeved shirt and just pushed the sleeve up on the left side; even though the light was starting to fade a little by the time they left the apartment, he knew the last little frets of it would cling to the steel given half the chance.

Roy’s over at the table now, pouring himself a glass of white wine—not that it’s _white_ ; why do they call it that?  It’s like… off-white… ish… beige.  Off-whitish beige wine.

…yeah, ‘white’ sounds much less stupid, even if it’s wrong.

The guilt starts as an itch—like the corner of a scab catching on rough fabric, chafing until it starts to part from the skin, and Ed can just feel the sting from the raw flesh underneath.  Roy takes his glass, swilling it gently, and goes and leans back against the fence off to the side—so fucking casual; so fucking _smooth_ ; he slips his free hand halfway into his pocket and sips from his glass, eyelids low.  There’s a string of little white—well, _ivory_ , or even pale yellow if you’re being strict here—fairy lights hung overhead, and the line bows just low enough for the light to glimmer on the bowl of the glass when Roy tips it.  He’s just sort of… watching, idly.  He looks kind of—peaceful.  And kind of—

Enthralling.

Somehow.

There’s just something about the way the light gleams _right_ on the faint sheen of sweat on his collarbones, so that Ed can’t even get his eyes to look at anything else.  And what the fuck is it with Roy and shoving his collarbones in people’s faces, anyway?  Yeah, it’s about a billion degrees and humid and whatever, but he could—do up the other three buttons of his shirt.  He _could_.  As a courtesy.  To people who find his collarbones abnormally fucking distracting and shit.

Except of course that it’s not his fault Ed’s such a fucking freak.

The guilt’s swimming in his bloodstream now—creeping slow and inescapable, swelling as it goes, and the pressure of it on his brain makes him dizzy.

He takes a long-ass fucking drink of the cold soda and tries not to cringe at the way the carbonation plays through his sinuses, and then he hauls his ass up and forces it to take him over towards Roy.

He stops what he figures is a safe—a _reasonable_ —distance away and settles back against the fence like Roy’s been doing all this time.  It feels fucking weird, though, just… leaning.  Aimlessly.

Roy doesn’t say jackshit.

Roy doesn’t even look at him.

Is he _that_ pissed?

Fuck.

“Hey,” Ed pushes out around the stranglehold this thing has on his throat.  “I—wanted to say sorry for… calling you out like that.”  His guts sink, sink, sink, and drown.  “That was shitty of me.  It’s none of my fucking business.  And—like, in front of everybody, too.”  Maybe the ground will part along the seam of the cobblestones and swallow him once and for all.  “Sorry.”

“Don’t be,” Roy says.  He’s looking over now; Ed can feel it.  His voice is light again—airy, floaty, like a breeze through the heat.  “One of the many things I admire about you is the way that you dare the people around you to be better.”

Ed has to look back, even though he doesn’t especially want to, but otherwise narrowing his eyes wouldn’t have any effect.  “That’s a real nice way of saying ‘You point out people’s flaws in public like a fucking asshole.’”

Roy’s grin is—

Reckless.

Ruthless.

Stunning.

“I _am_ a politician,” he says, like either of them could’ve possibly forgotten what with all the bureaucratic drama that’s been keeping them both in the office well after dark this whole stupid month.  “I mean that, though—I need people around me who keep me grounded.  I think Riza’s been trying to figure out how to ask me if I’m an alcoholic for several weeks now.”

Ed eyes him a little more, just for good measure.  Not ’cause the side-eye thing puts interesting shadows on his profile, or anything.  “It’s not like her to hold back about stuff like that.”

“It’s not,” Roy says.  This smile’s fainter and much less… nice.  “But there are several volumes of backstory I won’t bore you with.”

“You said ‘if’,” Ed says.  “‘If’ you’re an alcoholic.”  His soda’s probably getting warm and disgusting and shit, but it’ll have to wait another second.  “Are you, or are you not?”

“Entirely truthfully,” Roy says, “I’m not sure.”  He raises his glass in a mock-toast.  “Is it alcohol specifically, or does alcohol just happen to be the most accessible crutch available to me at this point in my life?”

“Crutches are for people with fucked-up legs, Mustang,” Ed says.  “You gotta figure out how to walk.”

“I know,” Roy says, softly again, almost to himself, with that weird-ass smile—the one that looks like it belongs to somebody else.  Like it’s superimposed by an overlapping ghost.  “Trust me, I know.”

That’s the problem.

That’s the _whole_ problem, isn’t it?

Ed trusts him.

That’s what’s hard.

Can’t say that, though, so he chugs some of his soda and lets the bubbles tickle at his brain.

Havoc and Rebecca have ended up sitting on top of one of the tables, surrounded by a ring of most of their guests, who’ve pulled up chairs.  Al is intently focused on braiding Elysia’s hair, and a pang of longing knifes through the middle of Ed’s chest, lightning-swift, and the plasma crackles outward for a long time after the brightness fades.

How the fuck long has it been since anybody but Al…?  And sure, there are high-fives and handshakes and the occasional shoulder-punch and shit, but those aren’t… that doesn’t…

And nobody’s _ever_ touched him the way Havoc’s touching Rebecca right now as he oh-so-fucking-carefully guides a little wayward curl back behind her ear.

Roy’s practically emptied his glass even though Ed’s barely had time to sip his damn soda.  That’s efficient, is what that is.  Also, unsettling as hell.  What number is Roy on, anyway?  Ed could probably calculate his BAC, although fuck knows how much the bastard weighs, exactly, and…

And maybe it’s better to distract him with conversation than with the specifics of the math.  That seems to work better with most people, which is stupid, but that’s the universe for you.

“So what do you think?” Ed asks, inclining his head towards the mushy romance shit unfolding.  “What do you _really_ think?”

This smile’s thinner but more genuine than the last one.  “I’m glad that they’re happy,” Roy says.  “Although I’m not looking forward to every other sentence beginning with ‘Well, when you’re in love’, or to the endless references to the unwritten law that the achievement of domestic bliss somehow qualifies as wisdom.”

Ed swallows.  He looks down at his drink, swirls the bottle, glances back up.  He swallows again.  Fuckin’ heat.  “You believe in it?” he asks.  “The whole—love thing?”

“I know for a fact that it happens to some people,” Roy says, and for a heart-stopping second, Ed thinks he’s looking at _Winry_ , but—

He’s not.

He’s looking at Gracia.

“I also know,” Roy says, “also for a fact, that it doesn’t happen to others.”  He gestures with his glass in Hawkeye’s direction, so maybe it’s good that the damn thing’s empty, or these rosebushes would be getting tipsy too, pretty soon.

Roy notices that the dregs of the liquid in his glass look lonely and knocks back the remainder of the wine, and then he turns a terrible, _terrible_ look on Ed—it’s half wry amusement and half fucking _agony_ , and—

“I know for a fact that it doesn’t happen to me,” he says.  A flash of teeth without a scrap of humor: “Ah—I should rephrase that.  I know it happens to me.  I know it doesn’t _work_ , because the other person’s always—there’s always something—” He waves his hand, and Ed’s instinct is to grab the glass away before he accidentally throws it, but he seems to have a death grip on that thing.  “There’s always something in the way.  Or some _one_.  Or I’m just not—” He looks down into the empty glass and frowns like he’s confused about how it got that way.  “—enough.  Will you excuse me?”

“Uh,” Ed says.  “Sur—”

Roy beelines to the fucking drinks table and refills his glass.

He should really just take the bottle, at this rate.  Or get a second glass for his other hand.  Maybe he’s trying to burn off some of the calories by going back and forth.

“Is it considered crass to consume the majority of the item you brought?” Roy asks as he returns.

“You must be real drunk,” Ed says, “if you’re asking _me_ about etiquette.”

Roy—

—laughs.

Not too loud, and not too hard, but _helplessly_ , and the sound is so fucking different from the snickering or the overstated _ha-ha_ shit Ed’s used to from the office; this is—

This is the unguarded laugh he usually saves for Hawkeye.

“Touché,” he says, and maybe it’s the laugh, and maybe it’s the light, but the way his eyes glitter is mesmerizing, and Ed’s hand keeps tightening around his stupid soda.  “Hell.  I’m going to regret this tomorrow.”

“Such a fucking procrastinator,” Ed says.  “Why don’t you start regretting it now and stop _doing_ it?”

Roy laughs again, which is a pretty good indicator of two things: one, that he is, as Ed has always suspected, batshit as all fuckin’ get-out; and two, that he’s completely missing the point.

“Why, _Ed_ ward,” Roy said, and his voice swings low and deep on the first syllable of Ed’s own fucking _name_ and then back up through eight levels of purgatory to hit the last sound.  “If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were worried about me.”

“I’m just worried I’m gonna have to carry you home in a couple hours,” Ed says.  “And if it was just you, that’d be one thing, but I dunno if there’s anyone on the planet who can carry you _and_ your ego a couple miles.”

This sort of back-and-forth bullshit used to make Roy smirk and scoff and huff and sigh in the office, and then he’d give back as good as he got—or usually better, since Ed was a kid, for one thing; and perpetually flustered and stressed out of his mind, for another.

But right now he’s just… laughing.  Quietly, but with this unbelievable _shine_ in his eyes like starlight stored up for years and then unleashed.

“I missed this,” he says.

Ed—

—is a heartbeat.  Nothing more.  Tapping and prancing, nosing at the line, and then a soundless gunshot, and it’s _off_ —

“It scared me,” Roy says.  “The way you withdrew.  I didn’t know why, or not entirely—I didn’t know the depth of it, and I wasn’t sure it was my place to ask; and I thought that if I did, you might just pull back further, and… it felt like we were losing you.  It felt like the whole world was losing you, and all the time, you were right _there_.  And it was so damned—” This smile’s brittle.  “—unfair.  You and I both know that’s a stupid word, but… Everyone else got what they wanted.  _You_ got what you wanted, but then you weren’t fulfilled—it was just a new emptiness; just an emptiness that was so much _bigger_ , and I couldn’t tell what that space was even for, but I knew it was killing you; I knew…”

He gulps down three huge fucking mouthfuls of wine before Ed can shake himself awake enough to try to get that fucking glass away from the bastard’s dumb, dumb, drunk fucking ass.

“I could see the hopelessness,” Roy says, and Ed stops with his metal hand out, eyes fixed on the stem of the stupid wineglass he was going to swipe for.  “I could see you realizing that you’d finished everything you’d ever known how to care about, and the world was too big without a purpose in it; it was huge and indifferent and meaningless, and the insignificance of all of it was crushing you, and I didn’t know how to tell you—”

He looks at Ed, and Ed’s a puppet on a goddamn string, staring back.  Roy smiles.  He looks like a person when he’s not smirking—like a person Ed gives a shit about; like a person who matters; like a person with big dreams and a bigger heart than he dares let on.

And Ed’s heart squeezes tight, and he drops his hand and fists it until the steel creaks, and it occurs to him—in a distant kind of way—that it’s a miracle he hasn’t dropped his stupid fucking soda on the ground by now.

“I didn’t know how to tell you,” Roy says, “that you weren’t alone.  That you aren’t.  That you never have to be.”

There’s something—funny.  In the pit of Ed’s stomach.  Something strange and fluttery and fragile but… moving.  Something alive.  A little bird cracking through some kind of a cold, cold shell; shifting its tiny bones, opening its wings—

Not a winter bird.

No cool feathers; no frigid puff of feeble breaths; no snow; no ice.

It’s a phoenix.

There’s a phoenix inside of him, stretching out its wingspan, erupting into a _torrent_ of flame.

“The hell are you on about?” he croaks out as the steam turns to smoke, and the smoke turns to ash, and his throat clogs with cinders, and the embers dance red-gold on the back of his tongue.

And Roy—

—smiles at him.

Like he’s important.

Like he’s the most important fucking person in the entire world in this second; like he’s the most important thing in the entire fucking universe.

“There’s nothing wrong with you,” he says.  “Listen to me, Ed—there is _nothing_ wrong with you.”

Ed can’t breathe through the fumes; every word he tries to scavenge for in his own head slips through his fingers and winks out to nothing as it hits the flames.

“Okay,” he says.

Roy draws in a deep breath and sighs it back out, and the smile tilts sort of sardonic but doesn’t fade.

“I mean it,” he says.  “I suppose it’s—I suppose it’s difficult to believe anything I say when you know firsthand how many masks I keep on hand; how many lies I have to tangle with the truth—how many I’ve told _you_ over the years, and some of them were…” He sighs— _again_ —and sweeps his empty hand towards the glass again, palm up, to indicate its contents far more elegantly than anybody should be capable of when they’ve had that much of them.  “That’s part of the reason for this.  It’s—you wouldn’t know.  I’m so damn glad you wouldn’t know, but it gets—so—easy, after a while.  It gets so easy to lie and keep lying; it becomes a reflex.  Everybody gets a different version of a man you never were—the one to make them do the thing you want; the best fake likeness for any given situation.  I have a thousand of them, and you start…”

He drinks.

He looks up at the lights, then across the yard as everyone starts laughing.

“You start to forget who you’re supposed to be when you’re alone,” he says.  “Lies are like light—like color.  They don’t exist until they have something to reflect on; they don’t bounce back to you until they’ve hit something.  And you start to think—” He drains the glass; there’s a spark of wildness—of desperation—in his eyes.  “You start to think that if you can’t tell what you are in silence, perhaps you don’t exist at all.”

Ed fights through the tremor in his chest of _Fuck you, Roy; don’t you dare get weak on me; you’re one of the last damn pillars that I’ve got._   “You’re trashed, Mustang.”

“Probably,” Roy says, with a disturbingly cheerful singsong note to his voice now.  “Times like this, around people like this…”  He waves the empty glass towards the assembled ragtag group of small-scale heroes.  “They’re the only time I can let my guard down long enough to see if there’s something left behind it.”

“Of course there fucking is,” Ed says, concentrating on speech and not the way his stomach churns.  “I’ve seen it, when it’s just—you and me and Major Hawkeye.  The real you is this—I dunno.  Dumbass, weirdly sensitive kind of… dork.  Who’s—kind of nice, I guess.  And the scary-smart thing’s always still a part of you; it’s just… softer when you’re using it to try to understand people and help them and shit instead of just to plan in circles around them all.”

Roy is looking at him like he’s…

It.

Like he’s the start and the end and the whole muddled rest, and he’s _beautiful_.

And the phoenix in him opens its wings, and the pyre collapses under its own weight, and it’s like a flush through his whole body—under every inch of his fucking skin; _fire_ in his blood, and his veins tighten, and his heartbeat fills his head.

“May I have that in writing?” Roy asks.

“Hell, no,” Ed’s voice says, and his hand realizes it’s holding something, but his feet want to _leave_.  “Hold this,” he hears himself say next.

Roy looks faintly surprised when Ed shoves the soda bottle at him, but then he takes it.

And then he arches an eyebrow and angles a smirk, and he presses his lips to the neck of it, all without ever looking anywhere but at Ed’s eyes.

Ed is burning _alive_ , and his knees won’t hold steady, and his slamming heart jumps to his throat, and he is—

Not okay, _not_ okay, not going to stay here, not all right at _all_ —

A swirl of plants and people and cobblestones; a blur of stucco, the nip of it against his fingertips as he braces a hand against the wall of the house; dark boards of a tall fence, and then a gate, and then—

Open air and freedom, and his body propelling itself _outward_ , but it’s just too fucking hot—

Through the dizzy thudding of his blood he thinks—he can’t do anything about the clothes; can’t expose the automail, or it’ll just get hotter.  Something’s got to fucking give; something…

He stops, bends, fights the knotted laces, and yanks off his boots.  He takes his fucking socks off, too; the right one is damp, which is disgusting; he crams them into the shoes and then ties the laces together and hangs them around his neck.  They swing against his chest as he keeps walking—nice, even rhythm.  Air on his foot.  The stones are hot as _hell_ underneath the right; he walks through pools of shadow wherever he can.

In an abstract sort of way, he recognizes that this is pretty stupid—it’s not a part of town he’s especially familiar with, and he’s wandering practically blind; he hasn’t paid a fucking lick of attention to where he’s been turning, or what the streets are, or anything other than just… moving.  All he wants to do is move.

Sweat beads on his forehead, on his throat, on the bridge of his nose—on the inside of his elbow, on the back of his knee; the small of his back is a _swamp_ , and the shirt’s sticking, and he doesn’t have the slightest fucking idea how far he’s gone.  Can’t be too far, or he’d feel more dehydrated than this.

He’s dodged through the shaded areas of enough sidestreets to have emerged into some kind of a square—which is practically deserted, no surprise; nobody wants to be out in this godforsaken heat.  The glare of the last streams of sunlight off of the storefront windows makes his eyes hurt.  Figures move languidly inside one of the shops, and as he averts his gaze from the harsh brightness on the glass, he finds himself halfway to a huge, overstated fountain with a bronze statue of some military douchebag on a horse.

Ed makes a slow circuit around the fancy-ass stone base trying to find a plaque—turns out, though, that it’s some Führer from ages ago, which sucks, because it deprives him of a hell of a lot of general and mustang jokes.

All the same, it’s as good a place as any to park his ass and try to figure out what the _fuck_ is going on in his head and his bloodstream.

The obviously-not- _too_ -esteemed-or-his-statue’d-be-somewhere-more-populous Führer Whatshisbucket’s horse is rearing up off of a big mess of verdigris-riven bronze that looks like it’s supposed to be an outcropping of rock or something.  Somebody thought it would be a great idea to stick a bunch of spigots in the rock part so that water could pour out, but it just makes it look like the foundation of the Führer’s advancement is a stretch of territory spewing blood.

Sounds about right, actually.

All the same, the sloshing of the water, perpetually tumbling down against itself, is soothing whether Ed likes it or not.  And he cleverly sat his dumb ass down in the shadow of the too-large-looming figure, so it’s marginally less hellish right here, and… the water looks cool; maybe that’s just wishful thinking, since realistically it’s been out in the direct sunlight longer than he has, but the fact that it’s cycling through the fountain mechanics means it hasn’t been _still_ , so it’s possible that…

Oh, what the fucking hell.  He rolls up his right pants leg to the knee and sticks his foot in.

It’s not especially cold, but it does seem a fraction less hot than the surrounding air, so that’s… all right.  That’s all right.

Question is—can it cool down whatever the fuck’s inside him?

Because the thing is—whatever it is is just— _seething_.  And he’s trying to swallow it; he’s trying to look the other way and let it wither unattended in the dark, but—

What if once this thing’s alive, it never dies?

He runs his sleeve across his forehead, although it’s already so saturated with sweat from his arm that he basically just smudges the moisture on his face around.

That’s it.  That’s fucking _it_ ; he’s moving north and never coming back.

He’ll have to leave Al.  Winry’d never come.  He’d have to work for General Armstrong, wouldn’t he?  Probably somebody else runs North City; he doesn’t pay enough attention to that shit to remember the name.  Too bad, though; Armstrong’d leave him the hell alone.  At least about this.  Not about other shit, but the other shit he can handle.

Well, why not go all the way up to Briggs, if he’s gonna get the fuck out of here and start inhabiting a _reasonable_ climate?  It seems like General Armstrong doesn’t even hate him that much; he’d probably have a great time.  A really great time sitting in freezing fucking empty rooms all alone thinking about all of the shit he had to execute perfectly if he didn’t want her saber blade landing on his neck.

Might be better to stay here, come to think of it.  Might be safer, anyway, or at least it will if this warm front _ever_ fucking breaks.

He looks stupid with one foot in the fountain.  Besides, he’s mostly sure the water is a tiny bit cooler than the rest of the world right now, so he might as well see if he can lower the temperature of the automail, too.  He stifles the useless, energy-wasting sigh and hikes his left knee up onto the stone; the fingertips of his left hand are all swollen with the heat, and folding the cuff up high enough to keep it out of the water is significantly more challenging than it ought to be.

He gets it, though—eventually.  Because he’s Edward fucking Elric, and there’s nothing he can’t do; he _knows_ that; he has to believe it; he has to believe…

He plunges his foot into the water and almost-feels it and braces both hands out on the stone.

The way Roy—

Just that _look_ was like—

Swallowing a torch.

Or lighting one that’d been there all a-fucking-long, just _waiting_ for the fucking match to strike.

And that’s—what?

Terrifying.

 _Traitorous_ ; his body’s never—he’s never _felt_ —the jump of muscles at the core of him, the _heat_ between his hips, the stirring sensation like things were _waking_ , shifting, starting—

The pulse.  The pull of his own heartbeat; the _direction_ of it; the _yearning_ —

He doesn’t—

Do that.

It’s not—a principle thing.  He doesn’t care about that shit.  As far as he’s concerned, people are welcome to do whatever they want to and with each other, with or without their clothes on, so long as they’re not hurting anyone.  It’s not like he’s fucking sanctimonious about it or something; it’s not like he thinks he’s _better_ than anybody because he doesn’t thrill at the concept of all that crap.

It’s just that—

This is—

Not—him.

Not the him he recognizes.  Not the him he knows.  Not the person he’s expecting; this is _new_ shit boiling underneath the same old steel-dragged skin, and he doesn’t know—

Anything.  He doesn’t know how to think about it, or deal with it, or even what it _is_ , exactly, or where it comes from or what he should do or what it even _means_.

Well—on a basic level, it’s sort of obvious, right?  He’s hot for Roy fucking Mustang, of all the fucking people on the goddamn stupid planet.  He’s all fucking quivery and swoony and turned-on at just the famous smirk and the equally-famous mouth and one too-long second of standing in range of the dark, dark, midnight-blissful fucking eyes.

He doesn’t want—

—to want that.

He doesn’t want to see Roy as anything other than— _Roy_.  So few fucking people do.  People talk about the playboy thing—which is a front, no fucking less—all the time, but nobody ever… gets that close.  Roy can’t afford it, and he’s too damn careful; he’s too damn smart.  He’s playing this game to win, and he’s a lifelong gambler, and they’ve all thrown all their chips in for him, sure, but it’s different to be able to look at him and see a _person_ with actual feelings, and for him to know that you do.  He needs that, sometimes.  He just said so, pretty much in so many words; he just…

Bared himself—not in the sex way.  In the soul way.  He just trusted Ed with a hell of a lot of the messy, bloody truth that’s buried underneath.

Is that—what he wants?  Is that what he wanted _all a-fucking-long_ , somehow, or—?  But it’s not like he was… it’s not like you can fake a visceral reaction to all of the shit that’s made him ill over the fucking years; it’s not like he was _pretending_ to be nauseous, _pretending_ to be lonely, _pretending_ that all these things that fired up other people’s blood made him feel sick and empty and stupid and backwards and _wrong_ —

But when he thinks about the shine of sweat on Roy’s fucking skin—shifting on his throat as he swallows; nestling in the curve between his collarbones; glistening at his hairline, at his temples, kissing the pale pink flush on his cheekbones, gliding down his jaw—

It’s like—

Hunger.

And anger.

And parched thirst and a bone-deep frustration and always, _always_ , the tickle of the tongue of flame—like a pitchfork against the bottom of his lungs; like rusted carpenter’s nails scraped down a chalkboard embedded deep in his cardiac muscle; like a child dragging a sharpened stick along his ribcage like a fence, _clackclackclackclack_ bang—

Feathers everywhere; feathers and his blood beating _way_ too hot.

He drops his face into his hands even though it feels like the automail’s going to scald him.  Maybe if he puts some nice hand-shaped burn scars on his face, nobody’ll ever look at him like _that_ again, and it’ll be a moot fucking poi—

“Edward?” Hawkeye’s voice says.

He jerks upright.  He’d be freaked out that someone managed to sneak up on him that fucking easy, but… Riza Hawkeye’s about the only person this side of the Xingese border that he expects that from.

She’s wearing a pretty, flowy kind of skirt—it’s blue.  She’s probably got half a dozen guns hidden in it somehow.  She snagged a piece of cardboard from the side of the box of fruit that Falman brought, which she’s using to fan herself—he’s not sure if it’s doing any good, in the long run; the calorie output is probably greater than the return in air movement and evaporated perspiration, so—

She sits down next to him—near enough to be friendly; far enough to be respectful.

“Are you all right?” she asks.

“Yeah,” he says, and manages not to add on, _Just sitting here with my feet dunked in this bacterially-unsound water that pigeons probably crap in all the time, with my back to all of the avenues of possible attack, holding my head in my hands like some stupid movie hero making his own problems.  Like you do_.  “Kinda… needed a break.  Is all.”

“From the party?” Hawkeye asks.  “Or from Roy?”

It’s a good thing his instinct in awkward conversations is to set his jaw, ’cause otherwise it would’ve dropped just now, and he would’ve looked even _more_ stupid.  “I—what?”

“Your brother caught me a few minutes ago,” Hawkeye says, “and asked where you were.  He said he’d just seen you talking to Roy, but Roy was in the wine again, and you’d disappeared.”  There’s a crisp, dry tone to her voice that he’s not sure he likes.  Feels—prickly.  Like the first whiff of danger.  “Roy emerged from the wine long enough to ask if he’d scared you off, so your brother asked if he’d ‘put the moves on you’—he reported, and I quote, ‘Of course not.  No moves.  Well—possibly _a_ move.  Not even a whole move.  Half a move at most.’”

Funny how Ed’s forehead is, like, magnetized towards his palms today.  This heat does weirdshit to your physiology.  “He didn’t—I mean—he—it wasn’t like he was—coming on to me or—something.”

“Ah,” Hawkeye says, in the way that means _I would like to register, politely, that that made no sense whatsoever_.

“I mean,” Ed says, and he knows he’s flailing, and he also knows that the burning of his skin right now has nothing to do with the weather, for once; the flush exploded into his cheeks to start with, and shrapnel’s raining down his whole face, his whole neck; his chest must be the next target, like his poor fucking heart can _take_ any more of this.  “He did this—thing—with his mouth—and the soda bottle.  It wasn’t even—I mean, it wasn’t even really a _thing_ ; he just—looked at me.  With—in a—you know how.”

“I do,” Hawkeye says quietly.  “And he ought to know better than to put you in that posi—”

“But I liked it,” Ed says.

It’s a fucking miracle that he’s already got his face hidden, because he thinks he’d rather hold his own head under the water of this fountain until he drowned than look at her right now.

The silence just—

Sticks.

Like it’s woven right into the stifling fabric of the fucking heat, like every fucking stitch of sweltering weight has been imbued with a dose of wordless judgment—crossing and crisscrossing and shrouding this moment so thickly Ed can barely breathe around it.

“It’s not his fault,” he croaks out when he can’t fucking stand it anymore.  “He’s drunk and shit.”

“That does not absolve him of responsibility,” Hawkeye says delicately.  He strains to hear disappointment in it, or disgust, or—something.  Something that’ll explain it.  “And the journey from sober to drunk was entirely his own doing.”

There are really… no words.  There are no words in this fucking language sufficient for the mortification of telling his greatest ally that he betrayed the cause the instant their _boss_ made a sex-face at him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, since at least that’s a fucking start.

Surprise sounds slightly foreign in Hawkeye’s voice.  “What in the world are _you_ sorry for?”

He can’t gesture at himself in his entirety or the universe at large without sacrificing the safety of his palms-over-face-wall, so he has to settle with a shrug.  “I—dunno.”  It’s true, actually—his thoughts are such a fucking cesspool of miscellaneous swirls and strains of guilt of every variety that he can’t even tell what’s what.  “I just—I mean, I shouldn’t.  Right?  Or I thought I shouldn’t.  Or—”

“Edward,” she says, and the note of surprise is mostly ironed out, but there’s still a stubborn wrinkle left.  “It is not possible to fail at asexuality.”

He manages not to jerk his head up at that, but the rest of his body sort of flinches all at once with the suppression of the intention.  “I—well.  I mean, I just did.”

“There are no rules to this,” Hawkeye says.  “And therefore there are no violations.  If you can and sometimes do experience physical attraction, that’s _fine_.  I’m delighted for you.  You’re in a fractionally different stratum of the spectrum than you thought.  There’s nothing wrong with that.”

_There’s nothing wrong with you—Listen to me—Believe me—Trust me—_

“But it wasn’t—”  He tries to paw through the tangle of putrid shit his brain’s awash in.  “I mean, he was—fine; we were just talking about shit.  I mean, maybe I was talking—too much, or… I said stupid shit; I always say stupid shit, but, like, especially just now, and it’s probably just that I made him think th—”

“Edward,” Hawkeye says again, and has there ever been a day in his life that more people have uttered his full name at him to try to cut him off mid-ramble?

…on second thought, probably a few.

“You did not _invite_ this,” she says.

This time he does look up.  He can’t help it.  The sun rises; flowers unfold; his head lifts from his hands and turns so he can stare at her, and she looks seriously fucking solemn.

“It’s not your fault,” she says.  “None of any of this is your fault—none of it is something you did or didn’t do, or didn’t do well enough.  You might be demisexual.  You might be gray-asexual—somewhere in between those things and something else entirely—and you don’t have to ‘decide’.  You don’t have to pick one.  You don’t even have to _know_.  There isn’t a report at the end.  There’s just you, and the minimum possible amount of beating yourself up over who you are.”

She’s starting to sound a lot like Al.  He should really, really not let them hang out alone together.  Ever.  The world’s not ready.

“General Mustang,” she says—and damn it, she’s one of about three people on the surface of the fucking planet that will notice the tiny way his shoulders tense; “and his actions are also not your fault.  You did not compel him in any way; you did not encourage him to be or do anything different than what he would have been and done.  You are entitled to feel however you feel about him, regardless of his feelings; and…” She grimaces—just slightly, but it’s there.  “…vice versa.”

She’s tough.  She’s always been tough.  But he’s gotten better at reading her, too, over the years.  He’s gotten better at watching people, and better at cataloguing the tiny little cues.

“You’re saying he flirted with me because he wanted to,” Ed says.  Things she almost said start slotting into empty spaces.  “Because he—really wanted to.  That’s why he shouldn’t have been drinking and shit—it didn’t make him do it; it made him forget how _not_ to.  ’Cause normally he’s holding back.”  He gets the warmest, clearest, sharpest mental image of—not the last look.  The first one—the first _real_ one.  The one that resonated in the center of his chest and rattled him from head to metal fucking toe.  “This isn’t—new—is it?  This isn’t the first time; it’s just the first time I _noticed_ , ’cause he was too fucked up to hide it—right?”

He looks at her.

Slowly, slowly, slowly, she half-smiles, but it’s the kind that doesn’t warm up her eyes.

“I am not,” she says, “at liberty to disclose any information on that particular topic.”

“The oath of secrecy gets voided if you blow it yourself,” Ed says.

One of her eyebrows arches, and there’s a spark of humor in her eyes now.  “Is that how it works in court?”

“There’s a chance,” Ed says, “that I might not be the best person to ask about upholding the full extent of the law.”

“As an alleged co-conspirator in an alleged governmental coup,” Hawkeye says, “not that anyone has proven anything about such heinous accusations… I don’t suppose I have much grounds to talk.”

“Fair enough,” Ed says.  “So.”

Her other eyebrow rises.

Now or never and all that shit; at least if his heart’s in his throat, it’s not smoldering in his guts, burning holes in his stomach lining and catching all his other organs as it goes.

“So how long’s he been looking at me like that?” he asks.  “When I didn’t see it?”

She draws a breath, sighs, pans her gaze out over the courtyard, and relaxes her shoulders enough to prop her hands on the stone and lean back on them.

“A while,” she says.

How the fuck long is ‘a while’ in quantifiable terms?  It can’t be _that_ long.  His and Roy’s whole dynamic sort of—twisted right around the Promised Day, sure, when Roy couldn’t exactly pretend anymore that Ed wasn’t capable of thinking for himself, and Ed couldn’t really fake like he wasn’t sometimes kind of a little bit impressed by the combination of ferocious intellect and staggering self-control underneath the lazy pretty-boy façade; and then that encounter with _Envy_ just… And even before that, it’d been—shifting.  With the loan of the spare change, and the thing with Lieutenant Ross, and…

But he knows it wasn’t then.  Respect is one thing; this is a taste of a whole different category of emotion.  And he’s not sure he likes it; it’s sort of bitter and sour and strange, but at the same time, there’s this syrup under it that keeps going to his head, and he can’t help thinking—what if it gets better; what if this is just the surface layer, and everything else is _nectar_ straight through, and…

And shit.

Point is, the concept itself is kind of fucked up—first off, because Roy can’t afford any fraternization problems or whatever shit; and second, because why the hell would somebody as smart as Roy risk that for the likes of him?  Central’s resident loud-mouthed, broken-ass, half-steel shithead kid who wouldn’t even know how to put out if he wanted to, which he—doesn’t.  At all.  Whether or not the hazy image in his head of Roy’s ribs, Roy’s shoulders, Roy’s hipbones is starting to make his toes curl in a way that’s dizzying but _good_ ; whether or not the ridges of the vertebrae in Roy’s spine would look like the teeth of a key, and he’s been locked up inside himself for so fucking _long_ —

“Shit,” he says.  “Aren’t you supposed to be happy when somebody’s all—when somebody feels—like that—about you?”

“In my personal opinion,” Hawkeye says, “‘supposed to’ is one of the worst phrases in the entirety of our language.”

“Yeah,” he says.  “Just—I don’t know.”  He fishes his feet back out of the water and swivels around—carefully, to make sure he won’t splash all over her nice skirt or whatever shit—so that they’re sitting side-by-side.  It’s sort of weird having a conversation with someone when you’re facing two different ways.  “It’s all—fucked up in my head.  This, and _me_ , and… him, and… whatever.”

“I imagine,” she says softly.  “But consider this: you don’t have to do anything.  It doesn’t have to change any more than it already has—that is, your perspective; your understanding of him and his motivations.  What you owe him is service and loyalty as your commanding officer—nothing more.  And he isn’t going to ask you for anything else.  The important thing is that you feel safe and valued as his colleague and his friend.  Whether you want something additional is up to you—it’s on offer, yes, but the ball is in your court, and from _occasional_ observations that he usually seems to have a brain in his head—” He almost musters a real snicker at that, and she gives him an approximation of a smile.  “—I don’t think he’s foolish enough to try to reach for it.  If you decide that your preferred course of action is to try to forget that any of this ever happened, I don’t think he’ll argue.”

“If you don’t think he’d argue with me just for the sake of arguing,” Ed says, “you must be new around here.”

She really does smile at that.  “Well, Edward, there’s a first time for everything.”

Like somebody falling the fuck in love with you while you’re not looking, apparently.  And them getting wasted and tossing it in your face and then being startled when it explodes.  “Guess fuckin’ so.”

She reaches over and pats his shoulder, which is a nice gesture, but it’s the right shoulder, so he can’t really feel it.  “No matter what happens, Ed, I’m on your side.”

He eyes her.  “But you and him—”

“He can take care of himself,” she says.  “You’ve spent your whole life taking care of _other_ people—I’m not sure you even know what it means to put yourself first.”

“I mean, thanks,” he says, “but I don’t need—” He swallows _charity_ in the nick of fucking time.  “—help.  I’m fine.  I’ve always been fine.”

“There’s a first time for everything,” she says.

“Right,” he says, slowly.  Obviously she still spends too much damn time with Roy; she’s up on the word games and everything.

She gestures back the way they came—or what must be the way she came; he can’t fucking remember where he started.  “Did you even get to try any of your ingeniously-preserved dessert?”

He shakes his head.  “Guess it probably won’t eat itself.”

“I certainly hope not,” she says.  “That sounds a bit… unsettling.  Perhaps we shouldn’t risk it.”

“Yeah,” he says, and the smile for her comes easier than he expected.  “Maybe not.”

She stands, and he gets up, too—and rolls his pants legs back down so he won’t look like a total fucking moron, although the shoes hanging around his neck probably take care of that anyway.

Al grabs his arm the second they set foot in the yard again.  Hayate’s next, bounding over to stop short in front of Hawkeye’s feet, head at attention, awaiting command.

And Roy’s next—hovering just behind Al.  Hesitation looks like an ill-fitting suit on him, and his poker face is shot to shit, so the guilt pours straight through.

“Edward,” he says, and he half-raises one hand and then stops still.  “I—”

Ed’s heart has taken up residence in the back of his mouth again, but he forces words out fast and loud.  “I got better shit to be pissed about than you, Mustang.”

Roy blinks three times and then rearranges his face into a sly sort of smile, clutching one hand to his chest.  “Better than _me_?  Oh, how the mighty have fallen; I don’t know if my dignity will ever recov—”

“Yeah, yeah,” Ed says.  “Save it for the tell-all autobiography.”

“How did you know about that?” Roy asks.

“Lucky guess,” Ed says.

“Uh oh,” Hawkeye says, kneeling to look at Hayate.  “Was Alphonse giving you treats you knew you shouldn’t take?”

Hayate’s ears flatten against his head, and Ed could swear the corners of his mouth turn down.

Hawkeye glances up at Al, whose reaction would probably be identical if he could control his ears—as it is, he compensates by flushing slightly, and his shoulders lift up.

“Ah,” he says, “possibly just… one or two.  He looked so _hungry_ —”

Roy puts a hand on Al’s shoulder.  “You should never admit to guilt until the jury presents incontrovertible evidence.  And sometimes not even then.”

“Thank you,” Al says slowly, “for that very practical and somewhat disturbing snippet of advice.”

“My pleasure,” Roy says.  “Now, if you’ll excuse me—”

He starts over towards the food tables, and Hawkeye straightens and strides after him.  “Sir— _no_ more.  Roy—”

There’s a lull—or a pause, at any rate; the rest of the party keeps percolating around them, but two seconds of silence in the bubble Ed and Al are inhabiting feels kind of like a blessing.

“Brother,” Al says, “are you doing okay?”

“I can handle it,” Ed says.

Al gives him the not-actually-angry frown.  “That’s not what I asked.”

Ed starts to rub his palm at the back of his neck, then changes his mind, because it’s hot and annoying and just sort of squishes the sweat around.  “Yeah, I know.  I—yeah.  It’s fine.  Just… weird.  I’m weird.”

“Finally,” Winry says, appearing from fucking nowhere right behind him, “a conversation I can make contributions to.  You know Havoc _sold_ his vintage Delarios roadster?  To someone _other_ than me?”

“Yeah,” Ed says.  “Unsung tragedy and shit.”

She scowls at him.  “I don’t expect you to understand; you can’t even drive.”

“I don’t need to,” he says.  “You drive me crazy.”

“Trust me, Ed,” she says.  “The crazy’s all you.”

Al sighs so loud Ed forgets how he was going to retaliate.

“I guess it’s safe to say we’re back to normal,” he says.  “Or as normal as we ever get.”

“Yeah,” Ed says, and he doesn’t even glance in Roy’s direction, but he can _feel_ it—

The slow burn of the banked fire, and the tremulous flutter of wings.


End file.
